Graduation Caribbean Cruise Friday, May 30 - June 7, 2014

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Friday, June 6, 2014

Today is our last day of the cruise. It sure has gone by super-fast, but been a fantastic time. As Royal Caribbean said in the Day 7 Cruise Compass, enjoy every last bit of your final day at sea.

Everyone slept in this morning, except for me; I was up at 5:00 am. Kinda scary when I don’t need an alarm clock to wake up. I headed to the Champagne bar to work on grading papers and participating in the class I am teaching.

Cindy meet me for breakfast at 7:30 am and we headed to the dining room for breakfast. As I have mentioned before, love being served for breakfast. Our table mates this morning were people we have say with before.

Following breakfast, Cindy and I went to the photo center to take one last look for photos before we collected all our photos. We actually found a few extras. We ended close to having 100 photos. The nice thing is we purchased, in advance, a photo package were we get to take all the photos. There are some keepers.

Cindy and I returned back to our room to get our airline vodka bottles and then headed to the Windjammer to get glasses of OJ. Once again, we made screw drivers for our morning drink. Shhh, don’t tell the cruise ship, we are not supposed to bring our own alcohol, ha.

Cindy and I had not played Bingo on this cruise; we normally play at least once. This morning we decided to play the snowball jackpot bingo. What is interesting with this Bingo game was for $32.00, we receive an electronic Bingo handheld device. On this device it contained 24 cards. My odds of winning were much better and it is much better than punching out holes. We did not have to anything, rather just watch the numbers/cards count down to a winning card. Guess what, myself and another player claimed Bingo. The jackpot was $300, I got half of this. Sweet, $150.00. Michael asked me what I was going to do with this money, I told him applying it towards our ship account, ha. What a fun way to end the cruise.

For lunch, we ate in the Windjammer. It is quick and the food is fairly good. The kids were doing several activities this afternoon, so we wanted to be available to watch and take photos. Michael played basketball with Brian. Apparently they played a lot on this cruise.

At 3:00 pm, Cindy and I had an appointment at the cruise planning desk to talk to them about cruises in March 2016, yes that is right, already planning our next adventure. We wanted to book something for Asia or New Zealand. We settled on a 11 day cruise to New Zealand. They had an onboard special, we took advantage of it. The trip starts in Sydney and then stops at Milford Sound, Doubtful Sound, Dusky Sound, Tauranga, Auckland, and Bay of Islands. This will be an awesome trip.

In the afternoon, Cindy and I always like to find a spot in the Solarium, adult pool area, where we can relax and even take a nappage. However today, everyone else had the same idea so we ended up going to the top of the ship, front and found some lounge chairs we moved in the shade. We hunkered down for a few hours, nappage was on the agenda. During this time, I snuck away and went to take photos of Jenny and Marcus doing rock climbing. Marcus had rock climbed before, however Jenny had not. I took several photos, some posted in this blog.

Our last dinner was a lot of fun, not only did we enjoy the food, but we took photos of wait staff. I enclosed a photo. The menu this evening was good. The theme is Pomodoro. The cruise description is “for the people of Italy, Greece, and many neighboring countries, it would be hard to image a kitchen deprived of the ripe red and versatile flavor of pomodoro – classic tomato. This is a cornerstone ingredient of this regions cuisine for centuries.” For starters, the menu included eggplant and Kalamata olive tartare, pan-seared sea scallops and chorizo, Spanish tapas plate, lentil and rosemary soup, French onion soup, chilled pineapple and lychee soup, tomato and baked feta cheese salad, and bay scallop gratin. For the main courses, the menu was awesome. The items included rigatoni pasta, sweet/sour premium vegetarian chicken chunks, roasted turkey, fish/seafood mash, rosemary lamb shank, and tandoori chicken salad.

Following dinner, we went back to our room to pack our clothes. The ship wanted our luggage outside our cabin door by 11:00 pm. We were able to keep our smaller things in the room.

For our last event on the ship, we went to the final Karaoke. We normally don’t attend Karaoke events, however there was not really a lot of events going on the final evening. The Karaoke ended up being quite entertaining. A couple of the ladies we on our St. Thomas tour sang and man were they good. Great way to end our trip.

This is my last travel blog entry for this trip.

Final thoughts about our cruise/trip.

· I really enjoyed seeing everyone from our family, Marcus, and the Guo’s happy. This is super important to me.

· Royal Caribbean, Jewel of the Seas, does a fantastic job with their service. Of all the cruises we have taken, the service on this ship was in the top 3.

· We will travel on Royal Caribbean ships again (2016 for sure).

· We will not visit Puerto Rico again. People are genuinely not nice, however there were a few people like our tour guide in Puerto Rico.

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